Why We Wrote The Law Firm Intake Playbook: A Note From the Author

When I started working with immigration and family law firms, I quickly realized founders were overlooking their intake process. My agency, MarketCrest®, was making these firms easy to find online, and paid advertising was working like never before, but the close ratios varied by firm and, within a firm, by attorney.

So, we began listening to recorded calls with their potential new clients (PNCs). We interviewed staff who answered the phones, those who ran consultations, and the people responsible for following up with promising prospects who didn’t hire on the spot.

We interviewed clients and prospects to document how they convert leads into law firm clients: the technology they use, the scripts and training they deploy, and how they hire, train, and manage the staff who execute the process.

Whether they knew it or called it “intake,” those practices added up to the firm’s intake process, the repeatable steps that turn an inquiry into a client, and the staff assigned to run that process are the firm’s intake team. Including consulting attorneys.

We didn’t like what we found.

There was no consistency in how immigration and family law firms were running intake. Very few of our clients used intake best practices, resulting in wildly varying outcomes across firms.

In our reviews, big leaks happen even before the attorney ever meets the PNC. Calls go unanswered during and after business hours. Messages sit in voicemail or worse calls abandon once voicemail kicks on.

Form fills age out. Consults are booked for PNCS that don’t fit and too often they no show.

The good news is that all of this is fixable, once the firm realizes and admits intake and consultations are functioning to maximize getting hired. Which means the firm can get hired more often and earn hundreds of thousands in extra revenue without spending more on ads.

Therefore, we realized, for us to be successful and for our clients to get an oversized return on their marketing investment, they needed to build and maintain elite-level intake teams.

Said simply, intake is your growth engine. And you’re leaving enough opportunities on the table to either make you mad or inspire you to action.

Which is exactly why we created the Law Firm Intake Calculator. So, firms could quickly see what even a 10% improvement in intake and close ratio would mean for the firm. When founders see the financial opportunities, they are stunned.

It’s common sense, when you answer faster, qualify better, and run a re-imagined, structured consultation, your hire rate rises, your cost per retained case falls, and your calendar gets predictable. There can’t be a hole in the boat if you want to grow fast, create a great reputation, make more money, and earn a sizable return on your marketing and advertising budget.

The last straw was watching a client invest $20,000 in sales training for consulting attorneys and intake staff, only to learn that “it didn’t improve close ratios.” The staff enjoyed the training and appreciated the investment, but they could apply very little to their law firm’s daily intake process. That’s a big investment for no noticeable return.

That was 5 years ago. Since then, we’ve interviewed countless intake staff and founders, listened to thousands of calls, read everything we could on the subject, saved every best practice, and trained some of our clients as beta testers of the system.

Now, you can access field-tested best practices, tactics, templates, top scripts for answering phone calls, emails, and texts, booking and reimagining consultations, handling objections, and the tools to train and organize your team.

You get the whole Law Firm Intake Playbook.

The only intake playbook written specifically for immigration and family law firms.

We walk you through it, front to back, and explain the key differences between the two practice areas as it relates to intake and consultations that close.

Intake as we define it for this discussion, isn’t just a step in the process; it’s the foundation of your success. Your revenue engine.

You can have the best marketing campaigns and the most skilled attorneys, but if your intake system is weak or even average, you’re wasting leads and losing potential new clients before you ever have a chance to help them.

The cost of allowing your intake team and system to be simply “average” is unfortunately hidden from most law firms. My team has been shining a light on the financials and doing something about it.

I’ve seen intake make-or-break firms. THAT’S why I wrote The Law Firm Intake Playbook. Over the years, I’ve worked alongside immigration and family law attorneys who were brilliant at practicing law but struggled to convert leads into paying clients.

The problem wasn’t their legal expertise; it was too often the gap between effective and ineffective intake.